When will 50s music disappear?

Cafe Society
1

I never hear music from the 20s, 30s or 40s on the radio, unless it’s some sort of special programming. The earliest music I ever hear on a regular basis is from the 50s, specifically early rock and roll. Admittedly I don’t live in the largest market in the country (about 250,000 people in the metropolitan and outlying areas), but I imagine that most people live in radio markets similar to mine. So when if ever will 50s music vanish from the dial? Presumably music earlier than the 50s isn’t played because there isn’t a large enough or wealthy enough market for it (what with so many people who grew up listening to 20s music being dead and all). So any ideas as to when the 50s might be over, as a radio format?

Sort of related, I’ve noticed that the “oldies” station has started playing pre-disco 70s music. When did 70s music become eligible for “oldies” status?

2

Who do you mean? Elvis? Patti Page? Ertha Kitt? Walter Brennan?

3

The fifties have all but disappeared on oldies radio already. These days the sixties and early seventies seem in to be in heaviest rotation. I’ve been bemoaning this decline for a while now.

4

… my cable provider, also has a music channel which is supported by advertising CD Now. Anyway, among their selection is Big Band music from the 40’s and 50’s, but Pop Music from that era? Forget it!

In the eighties, here in Georgia we had what were known as Beautiful Music or The Music of Your Life programming on several radio stations, but those died out for lack of advertising and from what a previous poster has already mentioned: the generation which supported that type of music has all but died. WABE, my NPR station in Atlanta features an hour’s worth of this type of music on Sunday nights. Maybe you have an NPR station with that type of local programming in your area, Otto.

Every now and then an old pop standard will be featured in a motion picture and a kid will want to know who the “group” is that recorded it. I think that this is a good thing.

That type of music will come back around though, I think. Take for example the brief resurgence of the jitterbug music of The Cherry Poppin’ Daddies of a few years ago, and the harmonies of The Squirrel Nut Zippers. (I still listen to their Christmas album every year).

Quasi

5

Actually, the amazing part is that music from the 50s is still being played (and I continue to hear in on oldies stations). No one played 50-year old music in the 1960s.

The main reason for it’s longevity is that the rock style of music still remains popular. Songs from the 50s are identifyably in that style, which is understandable to younger listeners. Older songs are not.

6

My 6-year-old daughter, who loves to listen to the Oldies station, had a question for me the other night as I sang her (and my) favorite bedtime song: “When will Somewhere Over the Rainbow be on Oldies 96.1?” My answer: “They play Oldies, but not that old.” But it did make me wonder why. I like a lot of older tunes, like show tunes (blush) and songs by Cole Porter, and I’d like to hear them on the radio without feeling like I’m a blue-hair.

Also, I really enjoy the repertoire my daughter is gaining by listening to the Oldies. She (and my 4-year-old son, as a matter of fact) can identify a Beatles song, even if they’re not familiar with it. My daughter knows who Buddy Holly is, and Frankie Vallie, and likes British-sounding pop songs (“Mrs. Jones You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter.”) She could sing “who put the bop in the bop shu bop shu bop” (or however it goes!) early into her Oldies-listening.

My only regret is that she now prefers it to classical, which had been our bedtime music before the public radio station began airing its university’s football games on Saturday nights.

7

Recording music wasn’t that widespread in the 1910s, was it? There probably isn’t a whole lot of recorded music from that era, and what there is is probably not broadcast quality.

8

The last poster just beat me to my suggestion: one reason for the tendency of conventional radio programming to pick a cut-off in the 1950s is that music from before then will have sound-quality unacceptable to casual listeners who don’t like record crackle &c.

9

As long as there’s a Time-Life Records, and 800 numbers exist, 50s music will never disappear.

10

When will 50s music disappear from the radio? When the Boomers disappear as well. I can remember “oldies” AM stations in the 1970s that played music styles popular in the 30s, 40s, and early 50s; those stations changed formats as their audience died off. The same thing will happen with 50s rock’n’roll, though it will take longer because of the sheer size of the Boomer generation and improved medical technology. :slight_smile:

A whole lot of music that was popular in the 50s has disappeared–the stuff that wasn’t rock’n’roll. You probably won’t find Mitch Miller, Prez Prado, Dean Martin, Patti Page, Les Baxter, etc. on your local oldies station. Rock’n’roll survives because the youth it was aimed at are still around. But this too shall pass. Some day Buddy Holly and Little Richard will be names known only to small groups of record collectors and retro-cool fans.

Otto: There’s tons of recorded material from the first couple of decades of the 20th century, but you’re right, it’s not broadcast quality. There was no electric recording – no microphones – until the late 1920s, and everything recorded before that sounds distant and muffled.

11

Sadly, you have to go out of your way to even learn about this stuff. There are record collections available, from companies like Rhino Records and Collectables Records, but these resources are most useful for people who already know what they’re looking for. I spent years buying lousy four-dollar tapes at Wal-Mart, listening to oldies radio, reading Rolling Stones’ History of Rock, and I’m still amazed at how much fantastic stuff was going on that I don’t know about.

12

True, but people in the 60s would never even considered songs prior to 1956 or so, no matter how good the recording.

Those were extremely rare, and they never called themselves “oldies” stations. Whereas stations that play rock 'n roll from the 50s are still going strong. Further, they attract younger listeners, too.

You can’t just blame the popularity of rock on boomers. People who weren’t born until a decade after the Beatles broke up rushed out to buy ONE. Same for a lot of the older music.

13

I agree with RealityChuck. I gave my 16 year old niece a copy of the Beatles “One” for Christmas. She was so excited: “It’s the only thing I really wanted.” The music of the 50’s and 60’s was good enough to be appreciated by generations to come.

Staying on subject (sort of) last Thursday was Chuck Berry’s 75th birthday! Hail,hail rock ‘n’ roll.

14

I’m 27 and I used to listen to oldies in high school. I still probably know the lyrics to all the “big hits” of the fifties and sixties. I think the fifties is associated with “good ol’ days,” (whether they were or not is another thread). I remember the oldies station used to sponsor an old car cruise and they kicked it off with “Rock This Town” by the Stray Cats. That always seemed odd to me, though the song does seem to have that feel to it. I’ve got a hunch that we’ll see more of the fifties music style return because there are enough children of baby boomers who grew up with their parents music, even if we complained about it in middle school. I hope I never see the day when 80’s music is on “oldies” stations, gaah!

15

Now guys, I’m not trying to put down rock or the rock generation. I’m just trying to add a little historical perspective.

First, every musical generation or movement produces dominant figures that are remembered for a long, long time. Sure, teens today know who Elvis and the Beatles are. But then, kids in 1970 knew who Sinatra and Louis Armstrong and Benny Goodman were too, even if they didn’t consider them to be hip.

Second, the vast, vast majority of musical figures are forgotten to all but a handful of fanatics. Try asking an average 16-year old who Sam Cooke is, or the Crystals, or the Everly Brothers and you’ll get a blank stare. That has nothing to do with the quality of their music, it’s just the passage of time.

Third, it’s really no mystery that adult-oriented stations in the 50s didn’t play old records from the '30s and ‘40s. Let me explain how our grandparents’ radio experiences differed from our own. When they grew up in the '30s and '40s, most of the music heard on the radio was performed live. DJs playing records didn’t become the main form of radio until the early '50s. This meant that previous generations were far less concerned with hearing the “original versions” of songs then we are today.

To us, songs are specific recordings made by specific artists at a specific time. “Strawberry Fields Forever” is a specific recording made by the Beatles in 1967. Peter Gabriel’s version isn’t the Real Thing, and neither is the Ventures’ version. We’re conditioned to think that old music=old recordings.

Back in the '30s and '40s, though, scores of different artists might record a new song when it came out, and different versions of that song would jockey for top position on the hit parade. People would hear these different live versions on the radio, and buy a record as a souvenier of that experience. The songs and the performers were the important things, not specific recordings.

So it’s no surprise that when these folks hit middle age in the 1950s, they weren’t so hung up on hearing 20-year old “original” recordings of their favorite songs. They were perfectly content to hear re-recordings of old tunes, or their favorite artists doing new material. (There are some important exceptions like jazz fans, who have always obessesed over specific performances.)

Another thing to keep in mind is that radio of the period wasn’t heavily formatted. In 1945 there wasn’t one station aimed at 12-24 year old female dance-pop fans and another aimed at 35-50 year old male classic rock fans who earn more than $45,000 a year. The majority of big radio stations were aimed at a big, broad audience, which meant playing a wide (yet inoffensively bland) variety of music. It also meant broadcasting a lot of news and other talk programs we now associate with talk radio.

In the late 40s, early 50s, live performances of music dried up and the DJ became king. Then along came rock-n-roll in the mid-50s. Kids loved it, adults hated it, and the radio world split. Kids listened to a new format called Top 40, while the adults continued to listen to the same radio format they used to. This old format was now dubbed MOR, for Middle of the Road. MOR didn’t play anything too raucous–you might hear “You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feeling” on it, but never “Louie Louie.” Most of the playlist, though, is devoted to old-fashioned pop music styles and big bands…just not the “original” recordings.

MOR continues through the 50s, 60s, and 70s on the AM band, then begins to decline rapidly in the 80s as its audience dwindles. For more on MOR radio, see

http://www.udel.edu/nero/Radio/mor.html

Growing up in the 70s, I naturally avoided MOR like the plague. It was horribly uncool, and it was on (yecch)lo-fi AM. Still, it was widespread in the older adult world, in offices and shops and on your grandparents’ car radios. I remember being forced to listen to it the barber shop. There was folksy, soft-spoken DJ who talked about 50% of the time and read many of the commericals live, there was the CBS News at the top and bottom of the hour, and there was music. Come to think of it, that barber shop radio is where I first heard Sinatra, Count Basie, and, for that matter, Ray Charles. Of course, I hated them all at the time. :slight_smile:

16

DaletheBold: Feel old. 80s music is the hot new oldies format:

http://radioindustry.about.com/library/weekly/aa022501a.htm

Of course, '80s format radio isn’t called oldies to avoid offending the 30-somethings, just as Classic Rock radio isn’t called oldies to avoid offending the 40-somethings. But no matter how you slice it, it’s nostalgia radio just like oldies.

Wumpus (who avoids the feeling-old issue by only listening to music recorded before he was born.)

17

(underline mine)
“How old was I when I first seen Old Rivers? Why, I can’t remember when he weren’t around.
Well, that old fella, he did a heap o’ work. ‘Spent his whole life walkin’ plowed ground.”
:smiley:

18

(Hijack in progress)

Well, the article foretells the fall of 80’s radio and I think in Chicago it has already happened. About two years ago, an all 80’s station started up in Chicago. WXXY, if I remember correctly. Lasted about 18 months and then quietly folded. Of course, the fact that their broadcast range extended about twenty-five feet (they kept saying the FCC gave them a crappy tower location or something) probably didn’t help. About four months or so before WXXY closed shop another station started (The Zone I think, don’t recall the call letters) that was marketing itself as “The Eighties and Beyond” and played about 85% 80’s music, 10% Early 90’s and 5% ‘modern’. After WXXY went under they slowly changed format to now where they’re “The New Rock Alternative” and hardly ever play any 80’s music. The Mix (101.9) has an “80’s at 8” show (at 8:00pm, naturally) which is an hour of retro stuff and continues to survive, but I think the article hit it on the head; after a few weeks, you’ve heard it all. You can only listen to Culture Club and Duran Duran so many times before you change the dial. Worse yet is that they all seem to play the same narrow playlist of the hits you’re most likely to remember and stay with so after a few weeks, you’ve heard everything the station will ever have to offer.